The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century

by Ross E. Dunn

  Visiting about twenty princely courts (including seats of governors) in the space of less than a year, he could well support his claim to status as a gentleman of consequence with a growing store of assets in hospitality gifts, not only clothes, horses, and money, but slaves and concubines. For the first time in his travels he speaks of acquiring bonded servants, anticipating the day in India when he would be accompanied by a large retinue of them. The amir of Aydin gave him his first slave, a male Greek captive. In Ephesus he purchased for himself a young Greek girl for forty gold dinars. In Izmir the sultan’s son gave him another boy. In Balikesir he bought a second girl. When he left Iznik he had, as he reports, only three slaves (one perhaps having been sold), but he was in any case traveling as a man of substance. The conspicuous evidence of his wealth and prestige would continue to grow during the ensuing journey across Central Asia.

  But first he had to get across the Pontic Mountains to the Black Sea in the dead of a bitter Anatolian winter. In stark contrast to his summer promenade through the orchards and vineyards of the lovely Aegean valleys, the final trek out of Asia Minor was a chain of annoyances and near fatal calamities reminiscent of his distastrous march to Qalhat along the South Arabian coast. The trouble began at the Sakarya River several miles east of Iznik when the little party started to follow a Turkish horsewoman and her servant across what they all thought was a ford. Advancing to the middle of the river, the woman suddenly fell from her horse. Reaching out to save her, her servant jumped into the frigid water but both of them were carried away in the swirling current. A group of men on the opposite bank, witnessing the accident, immediately swam into the stream and managed to drag both victims ashore. Half-drowned, the woman eventually revived, but her servant perished. The men then warned Ibn Battuta and his companions that they must go further downstream to cross safely. After heeding this advice, they discovered a primitive wooden raft, loaded themselves and their baggage on it, and were pulled across by rope, their horses swimming behind.

  Then at the village of Goynuk (Kainuk), where they lodged in the house of a Greek woman for a night, they encountered heavy snow. A local horseman guided them onward through the drifts as far as a Turcoman village, where another rider was hired to take them to Mudurnu (Muturni), the next important town on the far side of a wooded mountain pass.22 After leading them deep into the hills, the guide suddenly made signs that he wanted money. When he was refused any compensation until he delivered his employers safely into town, he snatched a bow belonging to one of the travelers and threatened to steal it. Ibn Battuta relented then, but the moment the rogue had money in his hand he fled, leaving the startled little band to find their own road in the deep snow. Eventually they came to a hill where the track was marked by stones, but by this time the sun was setting. If they tried to camp in the forest overnight, they were likely to freeze to death; if they continued on they would only lose their way in the dark.

  I had a good horse, however, a thoroughbred, so I planned a way of escape, saying to myself, “If I reach safety, perhaps I may contrive some means to save my companions,” and it happened so. I commended them to God Most High and set out . . . After the hour of the night prayer I came to some houses and said “O God, grant that they be inhabited.” I found that they were inhabited, and God Most High guided me to the gate of a certain building. I saw by it an old man and spoke to him in Arabic; he replied to me in Turkish and signed me to enter. I told him about my companions, but he did not understand me.

  Then, in a thoroughly improbable stroke of providence, Ibn Battuta found that he was at a Sufi hospice and that one of the brethren was a former “acquaintance” of his, an Arabic-speaking chap (from what corner of the world we are not told) who quickly grasped the situation and sent a party to rescue the stranded companions. After a warm night and a hot meal in the lodge, the group continued on to Mudurnu, arriving just in time for the Friday prayer.

  Convinced now that they needed an interpreter, Ibn Battuta engaged a local man (who had made the hajj and spoke Arabic) to take them to Kastamonu, the largest town in the region, which lay ten days to the northeast. Though the man was prosperous and reasonably well educated, he quickly revealed himself to be a greedy and unscrupulous character, selling anything he could lay his hands on in the village market places, stealing part of the daily expense funds, and appropriating for himself the money the travelers wished to pay a sister of his who fed them in a village along the way. But they still needed the fellow to get them through the mountains. “The thing went so far that we openly accused him and would say to him at the end of the day ‘Well, Hajji, how much of the expense-money have you stolen today?’ He would reply ‘So much,’ and we would laugh at him and make the best of it.”

  On top of all these miseries Ibn Battuta’s slave girl almost drowned crossing another river.

  The weary caravaners must have been blessedly relieved to arrive at Kastamonu, capital of the principality of the Jandarids and an island of moderately civilized comfort in the snowy wilderness. Ibn Battuta once again received the sort of treatment to which he was accustomed, feasting with the local scholars, meeting the amir in his lofty citadel overlooking the city,23 and accepting the usual robes, horse, and money. He remained there some weeks, enjoying his last encounter with a generous Anatolian prince and perhaps waiting for the weather to improve. Then, riding northeastward into the Pontic, now apparently with an entourage of nine, he crossed one of the high passes and descended through the dense forests of the northern slopes, the Black Sea and the land of the Golden Horde before him.

  Notes

  1. Gb, vol. 2, p. 416.

  2. IB’s reference to a stay of 40 days in Jidda cannot be taken as a precise recollection. As Hrbek points out (Hr, pp. 453, 467) IB repeatedly reports the length of his stopovers in particular places as “forty days” or “about forty days.” The use of this number as a conventional rounded figure was common among Middle Eastern and Muslim peoples. It appears frequently in Islamic ideology and ritual in Morocco. See Edward Westermarck, Ritual and Belief in Morocco, 2 vols. (London, 1926), vol. 1, p. 143.

  3. The Rihla’s earliest description of travels through Greater Syria appears to be a compilation of four separate journeys, the second one being in 1330 (1332) (see Chapter 3, note 26 and Chapter 6, note 2). Thus it is difficult to know precisely which cities he visited during each of the four tours. He claims, without adding any descriptive material, to have passed through Hebron, Jerusalem, and Ramla on his way from Gaza to Acre in 1330 (1332). Hrbek (Hr, p. 454) is inclined to believe, for reasons of chronology and logic, that these stopovers are out of place and that he went directly up the coast to Latakia without passing into the interior. However, IB could have fitted in a second visit to the holy places of Hebron and Jerusalem and been back on the coast in a matter of a few days. Moreover, he may have visited several towns and castles in far northern Syria in 1330. He mentions them, however, only in connection with the 1326 itinerary.

  4. In the 1330s the Genoese were probably just beginning to frequent Levantine ports after a hiatus of several decades owing to conflict between the Mamluks and the last of the Crusader states. W. Heyd, Histoire du commerce du Levant au moyen-âge, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1936), vol. 1, pp. 547–8, vol. 2, pp. 61–62.

  5. Eugene H. Byrne, Genoese Shipping in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Cambridge, Mass., 1930), pp. 5–9.

  6. IB claims to have taken ten nights to get from Latakia to Alanya, but if the wind was favorable, as he says, the trip could have been made in two or three days. Hr, pp. 454–55.

  7. Claude Cahen, Pre-Ottoman Turkey (London, 1968), p. 153.

  8. Ibid., pp. 227, 256, 349–50.

  9. IB gives an oblique impression that he learned Turkish at some point in his career, but, as Gibb points out (Gb, vol. 2, p. 420n), there is no evidence that he did.

  10. Seton Lloyd and D. S. Rice, Alanya (Ala’iyya) (London, 1958).

  11. Where Gibb has translated IB’s term al-fata akhi as
“Young Akhi,” I have made it simply “Akhi.” The leaders of the fityan were seldom young.

  12. Speros Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971), pp. 396–402. The author lists 26 places where IB speaks of being entertained by a fityan club. I count 27 or possibly 28.

  13. The main difficulty with the journey through Anatolia is that the trip from Konya to Erzurum is arbitrarily inserted in the narrative between his stops at Milas and Birgi, both cities in the far west of the peninsula. IB says nothing of how he got from Milas to Konya or from Erzurum to Birgi. The journey through eastern Anatolia seems obviously misplaced, but there are no internal clues to help sort out the actual itinerary. Hrbek (Hr, pp. 455–64) suggests that if IB’s movements were reasonably logical, he is likely to have gone from Antalya to Egridir, then turned eastward at that point and traveled on to Konya and Erzurum. He would have returned to Egridir by a fairly direct route and arrived there in time for Ramadan (8 June 1331 or 16 May 1333). He states that he was in that city for the start of the fast. Such a pattern of movement would fit in well with the chronology of the Anatolian travels taken as a whole. That is, arriving on the south coast in late 1330 (1332), he would have spent the first five months or so going to Egridir, Konya, Erzurum, and back again. He would then have continued westward to Milas, Birgi, and the Aegean coast, traveling through that region, as he states several times, during the summer. There is at least one annoying snag in this hypothetical reconstruction. IB places himself in Egridir for the start of Ramadan, but during a single visit to that town. Hrbek’s speculative solution hangs on the assertion that IB probably visited Egridir twice and that the Ramadan visit in May occurred following his return from the eastern region. There are of course several examples in the Rihla of his collapsing descriptions connected with two or more visits to a place into a single, first visit. I believe Hrbek’s reconstruction remains plausible for want of anything better. P. Wittek thinks that owing to the chronological and geographical problems of the Konya–Erzurum trip, IB made it up on hearsay. Das Fürstentum Mentesche (Amsterdam, 1967), p. 66. However, IB’s eastern Anatolian detour presents numerous details of personal experience.

  14. “Konya,” EI2, vol. 5, pp. 253–56; J. Bergeret, “Konya,” Archéologia 96 (July 1976): 30–37.

  15. Halil Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300–1600, trans. Norman Itzkowitz and Colin Imber (London, 1973), pp. 53, 108–09.

  16. IB’s precise itinerary in eastern Anatolia is impossible to fathom. The Rihla has him going directly from Sunisa to Gumushane, but no direct route existed owing to the high mountains. Hrbek speculates on alternative roads he could have taken (Hr, pp. 458–59).

  17. See note 13.

  18. In contrast to the standard historiography I have not closely identified the early Ottoman conquests with the holy war of ghazis. A recent essay convincingly argues that the ideology of tribal solidarity and the shared adventure of “nomad predation” unified Osman’s and Orkhan’s military enterprises, not jihad against the Greeks. See Rudi Paul Lindner, Nomads and Ottomans in Medieval Anatolia (Bloomington, Ind., 1983).

  19. Inalcik, Ottoman Empire, p. 8.

  20. IB states that he was in Bursa for the fast of Ashura (10 Muharram 732 or 13 October 1331). He took two days getting from Bursa to Iznik and remained in the latter city 40 days (probably more or less).

  21. D&S, vol. 2, p. xiii. These authors point out that IB demonstrated considerable tolerance toward non-Muslims. In this instance the Jewish physician did something reprehensible in his eyes.

  22. Charles Wilson (ed.), Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Asia Minor (London, 1895), p. 14.

  23. “Kastamuni,” EI2, vol. 4, pp. 737–39; Wilson, Murray’s Handbook, p. 7.

  8 The Steppe

  We traveled eastward, seeing nothing but the sky and the earth.1

  William of Rubruck

  If Ibn Battuta had inquired among the merchants of Sinope the most sensible way to get from the northern coast of Anatolia to India, they probably would have told him to go to Tabriz by way of Trebizond, then on to Hurmuz and a ship to the Malabar coast. He chose, on the contrary, to make for the city of al-Qiram (Solgat, or today Stary Krim) in the interior of the Crimean Peninsula on the far side of the Black Sea. Al-Qiram was the seat of the Mongol lord governing the province of Crimea under the authority of Ozbeg, Khan of Kipchak, the kingdom known later to Europeans as the Golden Horde. It was also the chief inland transit center for goods passing from Kaffa and other Italian colonies on the Crimean coast to the towns of the populous Volga River basin, the heart of the khanate.

  Ibn Battuta does not explain why he and his companions decided to cross the sea and approach India by the longer, more difficult route across the Central Asian steppe, but it is easy enough to guess. For one thing, he had already seen Tabriz, Hurmuz, and a good bit of Persia, and if he was to honor his extravagant pledge to shun territory already covered, then the northern route, the fabulous silk road of Inner Asia, was his obvious alternative. We may also suspect that by this time he had devised a grand scheme not only to visit all the great cities of the central lands of Islam, but to penetrate the outer fringes of the expanding civilized world as well. He had been to Kilwa, the last outpost of qadis and city comforts in the southern tropics. And now he had the opportunity to discover the limits of cultured society in the wilds of the north, where summer nights were so short that intricate theological problems arose as to the hours of prayer and the fast of Ramadan. Moreover, the previous year and a half in Anatolia had taught him all he needed to know about the satisfaction Turkish princes seemed to derive from entertaining and rewarding visiting faqihs. He was certainly well aware that the Kipchak state had become officially Islamic only in his lifetime and that New Saray (al-Sara’), its capital on the Volga, was a flower of cosmopolitan industry and culture that had bloomed overnight in the frigid steppe. If the little amirs of Asia Minor could treat him so well and contribute so materially to his personal fortune, what might he expect from Ozbeg Khan, whose territories and wealth were so much greater.

  In the Rihla he proposes a list of “the seven kings who are the great and mighty kings of the world.” One of them, naturally enough, was the Sultan of Morocco, who commissioned the writing of the book. Another was the Mamluk ruler of Egypt and a third the Sultan of India. The remaining four were Mongols of the House of Genghis: the Yuan emperor of China, the Ilkhan of Persia, and the khans of Chagatay and Kipchak. Though the Mongol world empire no longer existed in the Moroccan’s time except as a political fiction, its four successor kingdoms (plus the White Horde of western Siberia) ruled among them the greater part of the land mass of Eurasia. Admittedly Ibn Battuta did more than justice to Ozbeg and his cousin the Khan of Chagatay to put them on his list at all, for unlike the others (excepting perhaps the Sultan of Morocco, who had to be included anyway) they were not masters of one of the core regions of agrarian civilization. They were heirs rather to the Inner Asian plains, the core of the Turko–Mongol domain where the pastoral way of life still predominated, and where civilization came harder and later owing to the limits of agriculture and to physical distance or isolation from the main Eurasian centers of culture and trade.

  But if mighty kings are to be judged by the size of their kingdoms, the khans of Kipchak and Chagatay were among the awesome, for together their territories covered an expanse of grassland, desert, and mountain more than half the size of the continental United States. From the fertile grain-growing valley of the Volga, Ozbeg Khan dispatched his governors to the Crimea, to the northern Caucasus, to the alluvial delta (called Khwarizm) of the Amu Darya (Oxus) River, and to the immense Ukrainian steppe north of the Black Sea. To the forested uplands in the northwest he sent his cavalry to collect annual tribute from the Christian princes of Russia and orchestrated their dynastic affairs to keep them weak and divided. In the Slavic southwest he
intervened when it suited him in the affairs of the kingdom of Bulgaria. In his foreign policy he exerted an influence of a special sort over the Mamluk sultanate, because his kingdom supplied Cairo with most of its ruling class, the young male slaves who were captured in frontier wars or were purchased or extracted from poor families of the Kipchak steppe.

  Ibn Battuta visited the lands of Kipchak just a century after the Mongols launched their invasion of western Eurasia. In six years of cataclysmic violence (1236–41) the Tatar juggernaut under the generalship of Batu and Subedei had devoured cities and towns of Russia, Poland, and Hungary, leaving the Pope and the kings of the Latin West trembling for the future of Christendom. Though the conquerors withdrew from eastern Europe as precipitately as they had come, Batu, son of Jochi and grandson of Genghis Khan, established a camp near the lower Volga which became as Saray, or later Old Saray, the capital of the Khanate of Kipchak. Ibn Battuta knew the state under that name, the Golden Horde being an appellation bestowed by the Russians two centuries later. The adjective “golden” remains open to different explanations, but “horde” came from the Turkish word “ordu,” meaning camp or palace. The name carries a certain irony, for it suggested to the fourteenth century a meaning contrary to the modern image of a throng of wild barbarians riding into battle. The ordu of Batu (d. 1256) and his successors was the core of a stable and disciplined government under which, as in Persia, rampant bloodshed and destruction yielded to political conditions favoring revival of agriculture, increased international trade, and the rise of towns, some of them, like Old and New Saray, from the ground up.

  Prior to the Mongol invasion Islam was the dominant faith among the settled Bulghar Turks of the middle Volga region but had made little headway in the Crimea or the Ukrainian steppe. The khans of the Golden Horde were for the most part as internationally minded as their cousins in Persia, encouraging the traders of all nations, tolerating confessional diversity, and for the first seventy years of the khanate’s history keeping the promoters of both Islam and Christianity guessing as to what religion the royal court would finally accept. In 1313 Ozbeg ascended the throne and, as Ghazan had done in Persia 18 years earlier, proclaimed Islam the religion of state. His decision was a blow to both the Roman and Byzantine churches, which had until then held sanguine hopes of bringing the khans to Christ.